Woah, thanks for the hunt @thinker 🙌
Jonathan here, founder & CEO @ Appcues. Holla!
We’ve been using Slideouts internally for months now and really like the format. It’s something you’ve probably seen on a marketing site or as a teaser for starting chats, but we think the pattern is highly under-utilized. Couple of ways we've seen it used so far:
- Tactfully launching new features
- Drive 50% more sales demos for hot prospects
- Promote webinar attendance for free-trial users
- Collect NPS & satisfaction scores in-app
As @bentossell will probably point out, this pattern is nothing new; we’re just putting it to work. Our different types of modules, real-time user targeting, and one-click publishing make this something that you can finally hand over to your product marketing team and not regret it later 😅
Really appreciate ya'll checking it out and giving feedback. Seriously, it means a lot.
I’m here all day to answer any questions!

@hijonathan@thinker@bentossell Congrats Jonathan, Noel + rest of the team! We've also been trying to think about which other types of steps / UX patterns to introduce.. did you have a process for selecting this one over others?

@_pulkitagrawal thanks, Pulkit!
Prioritization's the magic behind building product, so there's much I don't know.
I'm a big fan of just trying stuff and seeing what happens. For slideouts (and many other ideas we've had), we built a hacky version to scratch an itch/problem/process that we shared with our customers. In our case, we needed to drive more demos and recruit user tester.
The experiment was incredibly successful, and along the way, we felt the limitations that would be lifted if it were part of our core platform, like leveraging our advanced targeting or the ability to change the content immediately. That experience made building it a no-brainer. Other experiments had less awesome results, and we just killed those.
Hope that's helpful.

@sarahadowney definitely. The main thing we've learned, and this probably resonates with many of the techies here, is that the right timing and expectations are incredibly important for good engagement.
Rather than giving a guided tour upon signup, we've seen a lot of success using a Slideout as a teaser that then leads users into a more detailed tour. We're still learning, but I think this works for a couple of reasons:
1. Most people aren't always ready for a guided tour.
2. Most companies are terrible at creating good guided tours (it's more often a bad episode of MTV Cribs).
Letting the user opt-in to onboarding or choose to do their own thing is better for everyone. It works well for onboarding, but it's also holds water when doing a feature release, asking for feedback, etc.